An Unkindness of Ravens

About This Title

In An Unkindness of Ravens, Meg Kearney's poems weave voices of estrangement and redemption: mothers, daughters, lovers of gin, and dead things. In an attempt to create an identity—to imagine a past when all biological and genealogical ties have been severed—Kearney's poems create their own mythology in order to tell an emotional truth. A number of poems find the protagonist speaking to the character, Raven, who serves an imaginary lover, friend, and foe: the vehicle through which the reader identifies with the speaker's joy and angst.

"Meg Kearney's An Unkindness of Ravens is a book of reticence and revelation, secrecy and surprise. Few poems are narrative, but something like a story emerges from these lyrics alive with hurt and splendor. Although the poems radiate personal feeling, we have no sense of confessional poetry as deliberate self-revelation; Kearney's confessional is Catholic. Some poems, especially the raven series, derive from the recesses of dream; others observe the world from the outside. Wherever place her poems come from, their beauty lies in their language."